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On Tuesday, the Office for Foreign Assets Control (Ofac), which oversees US sanction policy, gave the companies until October 23 to find a solution.

Documents published last week showed that Mr Barker is seeking to transfer shares held by Mr Deripaska to an “approved organisation or trustees” and direct any financial benefits to an escrow account.

Three months after announcing the plan, however, the company hasn’t publicly identified any potential independent directors, nor any buyer for Deripaska’s shares.

It also suggests that Deripaska and his family members are planning to transfer shares to a trust to reduce his stake to less than 50 percent.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Paul Manafort, then Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, tried to offer Mr. Deripaska private briefings about the campaign.

Suspicions that the oligarch has had links to organized crime have denied him a visa to enter the United States.

Mr. Deripaska’s spent more than $1 billion, through his holding company, on new infrastructure for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Lord Barker, the chairman of Mr. Deripaska’s holding company, hired a $108,500-a-month, Mercury Public Affairs, the firm Mr. Manafort paid $1.1 million to lobby members of Congress on behalf of Ukraine and led by David Vitter, a former Republican senator from Louisiana.

Oleg Deripaska sees U.S. demands for lifting sanctions on his businesses as unacceptable, complicating talks with the Treasury Department.

Deripaska believes the U.S. demands make no economic sense and are close to “enslavement”.

"If the agreement won’t be reached, the U.S. still may keep extending the license for Rusal clients to work with it,” said Kirill Chuyko, chief of research at BCS Global Markets in Moscow. “Otherwise, sanctions will hurt them rather than Deripaska."

Russian aluminium giant Rusal posted a second-quarter profit of $440 million on Monday amid higher market prices for the metal,

Recurring net profit at Hong Kong-listed Rusal was up 75 percent from a year ago, but down 17 percent from the first quarter of 2018.

Its net profit was bolstered by an 18 percent rise in the LME aluminium price over the period, while Rusal's aluminium and alloys sales fell 22 percent year-on-year to 783,000 tonnes.

Under the sanctions, U.S. customers have until Oct. 23 to wind down business with Rusal. As some orders can take up to two months to process and deliver to customers, particularly for value-added aluminium products, the sources said many customers will start to shun the company from August.

Sales of value-added products, a key part of the business, fell in the quarter and inventories rose by more than $460 million since end of December.

That was mainly due to the sanctions, as well as higher power, transportation and raw-material costs.

Rusal produced 1.87 million metric tons of aluminum and alloys in the first half, but sold only 1.75 million tons. That’s down from 1.99 million tons of sales in the same period a year earlier. Sales of value-added products fell more than 8 percent year-on-year to 869,000 tons.

Rusal is looking for new markets and clients, as well as trying to ramp up domestic consumption, it said. Russia and former Soviet republics accounted for 29 percent of total sales in the first half, up from 24 percent a year earlier.

Operations at the Nadvoitsky aluminum smelter in Russia’s Karelia region cannot continue as the plant lost access to its end market and to a steady supply of raw materials .

Production at the Nadvoitsky plant was completely oriented towards the U.S. market.

The plant has a workforce of 343 people and is the primary source of employment in the town of Nadvoitsy, which lies 485 km north of St Petersburg.

Before the sanctions were introduced, Rusal sold around 80 percent of its output for export, the situation could be catastrophic not only for all the company's plants around the world, but also for the global aluminium market".

Fitch said on Wednesday global aluminium prices on the London Metal Exchange could rise towards $3,000 (2,324.5 pounds) per tonne by 2021 if no "acceptable resolution to Rusal sanctions is found". That is compared to an expected 2021 price $2,470 (1,913.8 pounds) if the situation is resolved.